1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to optical systems and more particularly to attitude adjustment for light weight portable optical systems.
2. Brief Description of Related Art
Existing systems measure all three axes of rotation, i.e., angular attitudes, such as pitch, roll and yaw to measure attitude between optical devices. This can be very expensive and calibration intensive and may drive down reliability. Further, attitude between two optical devices, such as between a laser targeting system and a receiver, for example, a north finder is critical to reduce error in target computations. Typically, very large and heavy mechanical interfaces (couplings) are used between the optical devices to hold the two devices tightly and to ensure good alignment from tolerance perspective. However, such large mechanical interfaces may be sensitive, and if they get fouled, dirty, and/or banged, may result in misalignment and unexpected errors.
Another existing approach to measure attitude is to use a checker board pattern to generate parallel lines that provide depth information (pitch, yaw and roll) as the lines diverge or converge in the image captured by the camera. To obtain a higher precision in 3 dimensional attitude measurement between the optical devices, such an approach requires calibration on the non-linear aspects of the camera lens over temperature which may significantly increase cost. Also, these alternative methods require the measurement of roughly 40 or so reference angles and over a range of roughly six temperature set points.